mantisgodsart

[mantisgodsart]

Only [AGE REDACTED]? He should have been at the club!

An Art Fight attack and the process of painting it, ft. our cat because using him as a backdrop for our WIP shots was more convenient than trying to get him out of the way for any of them. TBN belongs to @strawberr1m1lkshake and is merely being appropriated by us for Cool Art purposes. Like half of the paints in this are metallic.

[mantisgodsart]

After many days of not making or posting art, we have made a quick portrait of an OC from a fic. Namely, Camry from Split-Face Camry.

[mantisgodsart]

After many days of not making or posting art, we have made a quick portrait of an OC from a fic. Namely, Camry from Split-Face Camry.

[mantisgodsart]

Clumping our Bugtobers into groups of three this year! We are toying with the gimmick of using one ink per day, mostly because we have way too many sample vials at the moment. This has thus far mostly involved a startling amount of learning to clean pens out thoroughly. Foxglove prepping for some free-range surgery, some more "pinning down our Vi design" activities, and, of course, [SPOILERS FOR DAY 11 OF OUR OTHER OCTOBER CHALLENGE].

[mantisgodsart]

In theory, the submission period has not ended while we were cutting this out, as we have been doing since we have unfortunately come to the realization that there's no way we're gonna be able to slap lines good enough to make cutting this out practical on this before submissions close. Please pray for us that Tumblr user flame-shadow has not stayed on schedule.

[mantisgodsart]

We have to post our works if we want people to see them. Can you believe it? Anyways, quick sketch of our latest iteration of Attempting To Translate Vi To Our Style In A Way That Still Reads As Vi, and also a pre-mulched Mulch that we drew to test out a dip pen. Will maybe make some more effort to more easily distinguish bees and wasps later, particularly with shape - a lot of the general bulk of Vi's torso gets disguised with the middle limbs here, and it takes away a bit from the build we're trying to achieve. We'll get the hang of it eventually, we're sure.

[mantisgodsart]

Did you know? You have to post art for people to see it. Wild, we know. Anyways, we finally drew our Bau's swords, and we're going to make you decipher their extremely thick (designated south Appalachian from our American Accent Experts) accent. Also comes with bonus notes under the cut.

"Y'see, the thing with weapons is that if y'ain't careful wit'em y'can really tear up a man. Throwin' metal aroun' th'place doesn' come without consequences. It c'n take a lotta work ta master any weapon't all, an' even more work t' keep from hurtin' anyone y'wouldn't want to." "Take m'swords, for example. These're cuttin' blades, n' they're hooked't th'tip. Y'see this sorta thing fer sport, usually, but they're a bit useless fer actual fightin' cuz they don't cut shell. Y'need t'have some dexterity t'put 'em to work, 'cuz hitting shell with 'em's worse'n useless. Dulls yer blades, 'n such. Y'need ta hit b'tween th'shell, or't does nothin', 'n any actual hit'll be real likely t'kill 'r maim." "Mine've got swordbreakers in'm, cuz I don' really use'm t'cut. Bit narrow t'really club with, but I like'm narrow cuz I like t'get inta guards. Th'hook's made ta get inta joints, but't works just's well t'grab shit outta bags'r hands, n' th'extra grabbin' bits make't a bit easier t'nab that." "'f I miss, worse't happens is't some bug gets'r shell sliced, 'n tha' doesn't mean much, y'know? No major hit, 'll scab over'n a few hours'n be fine. 'f I used a crushin' weapon, though, 't might actually hurt 'em." "'n a pinch, they'll work jus' fine fer th' original purpose. Fit th' hook 'nto a limb, give'a shallow cut, 'n most people'll back off once they know y'could've ripped a limb off. Makes't harder for'm t'wield a weapon, too. If's somethin' real fussy like a velvet ant- they don' clot like other bugs, so y'can't really draw blood from'm- then'm usually stronger'n em, so disarmin' works jus' fine, 'n I can hold onto 'em if'ey still wanna pick a fight." "…'sides, carryin' aroun' two'a these makes me look real cool, don'tcha think? All fancy'n such."

Bau's specific accent for the in-universe setup rather than the "translating things" is, like. Distinctly "cricket or grasshopper who has not really made an effort to, like, get around the fact that their mouthparts aren't super made for the sorts of sounds used in bugnish" which is perceived as a Hick Accent because a lot of crickets Do tend to work around similar, like, Perceived As Hick Industries Done By Mostly Uneducated People. It takes Effort to sort of train yourself to speak in a way that will read to other bugs as More Educated, and Bau has just sort of… never bothered? Best they've got is enunciating it a bit more clearly, chief. They're not relearning how to speak a whole language to be seen as Slightly More Educated.

In terms of actual in-universe sounds that are Not translated to English they'll just sound a lot chirpier. You could probably interpret some of the words in there as adjacent to the sort of shit you hear out of birds. Might be able to unintentionally set off the fight-or-flight of bugs who used to be heavily preyed upon by small songbirds if cussing violently enough. Sometimes you accent sounds with actually making the standard cricket-chirp sound if you're trying to be sexy.

Sometimes you also do this when you are pissed off at people, This is because crickets are Like This and a lot of them will fucking fight each other for the approval of a potential mate.

Anyways, the fun part of Bau's weapons is that they are deliberately built for being showy and impressive and letting them do flashy sleight-of-hand with their opponent's belongings while also being hideously inefficient enough as actual weapons that bringing them onto the battlefield in the first place actively seems like a terrible strategic decision.

[mantisgodsart]

Finally... posting our Art Fights to here. These two are our only finished pieces to be on full-sized pieces of watercolor paper, so we're grouping them up together. Also, coincidentally, the first two attacks we did this year. Thélo from @danspectorboy and Greenflight from @opossauce.

[mantisgodsart]

Sum of this year's Art Fight. 24 attacks, 39 characters, 37 fully painted. Will post everyone in individual posts later, but we've got a few pieces we think we could've photographed better, a handful of pieces that we think would be best scanned, and plans to paint our last two unfinished pieces in the off season. Once this is done, then we can properly move to our non-Art-Fight activities: painting other people's OCs again but with a slightly different context.

Individual pieces linked under cut. These may take a while to finish posting - please be patient.

Thélo from danspectorboy and Greenflight from opossauce

Hayday from MonsterMonsoon (monsoon-of-art on Tumblr)

[mantisgodsart]

(Isabeau voice): I've kinda given up on figuring out what Odile and Siffrin are doing on their trips out, honestly. Like… one time, I came to get them for dinner, and Odile was some kind of copy Siffrin, and Siffrin was poking her in the armpit with a tree branch? And then she made me write down a bunch of stuff about how closely you can throw a rock at her arm before it hurts, which, like, good to know, I guess, but what does that have to do with anything? I still don't know what that was all about.

Some Experimentation With Shapeshifting

Roughly 1.3k words of fucking around and finding out. Shapeshifting clothes is quick and easy and saves effort on fitting your non-shapeshifting clothes to your currently-shapeshifting body, especially when you are attempting to mimic a body you haven't seen in anything less than a cloak. Just... don't think too hard about the biology caused by it. Or the processes happening to your biology currently, in general.

---

"Can you... feel it, when I poke your sleeve?" Siffrin tentatively asked. Odile tilted her head, pinching a handful of shapeshifted cloak between her fingers.

"...a little bit. There's some sensation in them, but anything that I've mentally designated to be clothing seems to be mostly numb. Most of the feedback that I get from it is... more from how it affects the rest of my body than from how it affects the garment itself. Like... fingernails. I suppose. Or hair."

"Are they attached to your body, or just kind of... floating?"

Odile paused from where she had been feeling her sleeve between her fingers. "You know, I don't think I've tested."

The cloak, as it turned out, was attached at the hollow of her throat, right where Siffrin's flared into the collar. While the form had sleeves and pant legs, beneath the coat, the mimickry of Siffrin's close-fitting shirt could only be lifted off of the "skin" for a few centimeters past the sleeve's start, merging with the outer layer of the body past that - before the arm cut off entirely beneath the cloak.

And that phenomenon, really, deserved its own journal page. While Odile had never seen Siffrin's body under the cloak, she had expected this form to at least have a facimile of a human body beneath its "cloak" - this body seemed to default to... "simpler" structures, for lack of a better word, where shapeshifting abilities failed to fully capture a form, but this form simply had nothing.

Odile had experimented for long enough to have a decent idea of this body's quirks. Without direction, her shapeshifting would often lean towards simplified, almost stylized forms, like an artist would do in a sculpture. If she didn't specifically focus on getting it out right, most forms would come out with limbs and segments made of only the component shapes, with little in the way of additional detail. Hair and fur would clump into "tufts", hands would lack definition in joints and fingerprints, skin would look as if it were sculpted from clay or dark glass, failing to wrinkle or pinch at joints as it should.

Without a model directly in front of her, attempts at shapeshifting into a human often came out like... a human-sized doll, or something similar, but when she'd tried to shift into Mirabelle, she'd at least had a torso beneath the mantle. With Siffrin...

At first, it seemed like everything that went under the cloak simply vanished into the cloak's shadow. When she had tried to lift the cloak up, however, it had... stopped lifting, after a certain distance. While not the most odd thing that one of her forms had done, it was worthy of note, and thus investigation. Since it attached at the neck, she couldn't precisely lift the collar to check beneath herself, but when she had lifted an arm as far as it would go before the fabric fell back on itself and asked Siffrin to check, they'd just said that they couldn't see anything but darkness.

As it turned out, that was a rather accurate description for it.

As far as either of them could tell, the torso and upper arms of this body simply... didn't exist. While she felt like she had a torso under the cloak, the only thing that either of them could make out was all-obscuring darkness, and as Siffrin quickly discovered, the torso that the cloak's fabric moved around simply... wasn't there.

Attempting to reach under the cloak, both for her and for Siffrin, resulted in a spectacularly strange feeling of resistance. Like the air itself was becoming solid and pushing her back. Legs, arms, and neck simply faded into the darkness, seemingly dissipating after a certain distance. Attempting to touch where the limbs faded only produced more of the same hard-air effect, starting to push them back sometimes more than a centimeter above where the limb "should" be. Some quick experimentation quickly proved that it was possible to stick a hand "through" her thigh, with some effort, though by the way that Siffrin shook their hand out afterwards she suspected the effort involved had at least bruised their fingertips.

Throwing things at the darkness felt no different than throwing things at any other part of her body, it turned out. While hitting the tail of the cloak only had the feedback of something hitting her clothing, the area that something had to impact to hurt was a lot wider than it appeared to be- and wider than the apparent outline of her "body" through the cloak, as she discovered after a few minutes of Siffrin intentionally missing and her feeling the impact anyways. Siffrin's dagger hurt even when poking the space "between" her arm and her body, when she couldn't feel absolutely anything there until Siffrin stabbed into something previously unfeeling and immaterial. Stabbing into the cloak acted much the same way.

It took roughly two hours of experimenting with this effect before Isabeau walked in on them experimenting with trying to stick things under the cloak (an object held by a third party was repelled the same way that hands were, but unattached objects simply went through the unnatural darkness like nothing was there) and roughly fifteen minutes of intensely awkward explanations before Isabeau agreed to help write their observations down.

...after dinner, that was. Since, apparently, they'd been at this for long enough that they'd both forgotten to eat.

[mantisgodsart]

Also, while we're here, some quick reference pics we whipped up so we could have some Pokemon characters up on AF. That team from Paradise, right next to Post Town. Delcatty aren't a common Pokemon around these parts, are they? Maybe he's a traveller from somewhere else.

[mantisgodsart]

...also we just realized we haven't posted this on here. Hi, we're on Art Fight.

[mantisgodsart]

Art Fight attack! @monsoon-of-art's Hayday, you know, from the chimera arc. We think this one turned out well enough to merit an individual post. Fun fact - the eyes on this are a metallic paint, and when you shift the paper around, they shine.

[mantisgodsart]

Ref we're now posting because we think it turned out incredibly well! Finally, a character for People Who Can't Draw Animal Faces to attack. Which will be our only humanish character for probably forever. You know how it is with furry artists.

This is Marigold's fault, for reference. Considering that Sadnesses seem to be the only things still living in time-frozen areas, they seem a pretty logical place to go for time freeze resistance, provided that you're a transmutation-focused witch. AU likely to be further defined in future, this is just to get things down on the page and make it so that we have a decent target for human(oid) artists, because we don't want to inflict people with the particular emotion of when we click on someone for revenge and discover all of their characters are human.

[mantisgodsart]

[Tonight I dreamed of teeth and claws and what felt like a million grasping hands chasing me through an endless field. The air smelled of sulphur and acid, and I could tell something was watching me, far beneath the moss and earth.

I woke to find I had been shedding wing scales in my sleep, and that apparently one of my primary containment chambers was registering a foreign presence within it. The only thing there when I checked, however, was Mal, who is supposed to be there - and certainly not supposed to be registering as an intruder.

I hope I don't have to update containment over this. Rescribing every little knot in the weave every time I need to strengthen or add to it gets tiring, when you have to do it multiple times a month. Maybe I should start looking for an apprentice again, if only so I don't have to maintain the entire laboratory myself.

There's an old joke about this sort of thing, charmsmiths only getting an apprentice when they need to make sure someone's take down notes about the experiment that kills them. I'd like to think it's more simply making sure that my knowledge doesn't die with me...]

One of the two left over from @bug-oc Round 1, Mal from @sushiikando gets a post all to their own, just like a Round 2 contestant! This is both because zey're a big/complicated design and because we... really aren't gonna be done Pola any time soon. Which is probably what we get for making a comic, even a short comic, while in the time of summer where we actively struggle to think. Oh, well. We'll get it done eventually.

More details under cut, as usual - despite our enthusiasm for walls of text, we don't particularly want to completely obliterate your dashboard. We're getting kicked in the dick by fatigue right now, so further ones might take a bit - we've got Maria sketched out, and Pola's comic only really needs painting and accompanying story, so all fates willing, it shouldn't be too too much of a holdup. There's an abundance of things that we would LOVE to be doing right now, but heat does awful things to our brain, we're still feeling off from being sick, and with tourism season in swing to boot even with our current medication it's an uphill battle to get ourself to do anything at the moment. Hopefully, this clears up soon. For now, we're still very much alive.

First things first - wow, this one took a few drafts. Although not really an originally anticipated difficulty, the lack of reference of just what Mal looks like under that coat made a lot of our original ideas fall a bit flat unless we wanted to make something up from whole cloth. Marigold's transmutations don't include clothes by default, since actively incorporating inanimate objects into an animate body is both difficult and much, much fussier than usual when you're using Marigold's particular methods.

We tried a few initial designs that stopped at that point, then tried at incorporating the coat into the design more properly a la the more "abstract" brews, but after a few fell flat, we sort of... just started throwing spaghetti at the wall, so to speak, and spaghetti stuck. The body patterns here are, for the most part, entirely made up. Maybe the patterns distorted, maybe they didn't - we don't know what's under the coat and we will likely never learn. It's probably fine.

Our primary inspiration here is eastern dragons, particularly the mythos of the koi who climbed the waterfall - the colors and patterns of Mal's design reminded us of koi patterns on first glance, and after a few drafts, we started running with the concept, using both Mal's wings and the shape of the lab coat for "fins". Runaway To The Stars's Bug Ferrets also provided some inspiration (particularly in the face - if you click the link, those mandibles might start looking very familiar).

We also took some amount of inspiration from theveryworstthing's REMwolf series, particularly Laika and The Morriss Dragon, though a lot of the particularly body-horror-y and sillhouette-breaking effects we might have wanted to include in a more detailed piece got nixed by a lack of time. We cannot take the duration of the entire tournament to draw one Round 1 contestant, unfortunately. Even if we wish we could've gotten a bit more detailed, and we very much would've liked to tinker with working in some design elements akin to Sea Legs or Guard Dog or Biology Lab, we're very nearly a full month overdue by now. We have other contestants to paint, and so we must move on.

...fuck, this took a while. Thank you for being patient with us while our brain's scaffolding falls to pieces! We dearly appreciate it. Hope you have an excellent summer!

[mantisgodsart]

[...isolation of the transformation appears to worsen the standard disorientation of a new body. I believe that the familiarity of the upper body may be offsetting the psychological impact of the lower body - as not everything has changed, the subject still "expects", on some level, that their body will work similarly, despite radical changes to organ systems and locomotion and the near-total overhaul of the centre of gravity.]

[The subject appears to be leaning on hexapodal motion as a type of "crutch", despite the size of the lower body making most of these sorts of motions awkward at best - the tournament venue doesn't currently have many internal spaces sufficient to test this one's mobility, but outdoors venues seem more promising for testing, anyways. This confirms something that I've previously suspected, as well - subjects find it more difficult to adjust to addition of new limbs than they do subtraction of limbs.]

[Subject appears to exhibit difficulty with coordination in the lower limbs, and has adopted an extremely "cautious" form of motion, taking steps with one limb at a time. The difference between upper and lower limbs means that this mode of movement is extremely... clumsy, to say the least. I intend to keep them under observation for a few more days before release and see if this resolves within the initial settling period or not. After that, just some periodic check-ins should be...]

Hello, and welcome to: watercolor paintings for Round 2 of @bug-oc transmutations! Mirach by @ghost-of-hallownest. Some extra details under cut because this is a long post and we don't want to make it longer.

This one is based pretty heavily on Dragon!Falin from Dungeon Meshi, but we're bringing through some lizard-y aspects from last year, and very much having fun with the tabby-cat patterns on the back - though technically speaking, Mirach's blue is limited to her wings, adding some markings to the body helps us break up that big plane of sandy yellows and add some interest to the design. We think it turned out well!

If we could fit it in, we'd add a third bit of Marigold notes related to the actual transmutation method, since it's been living in our brain for a while, and we think our Potion Drawing might be a bit... abstract, otherwise?

More or less, the weave - the active transmutation medium - is woven to the inside of the lasso's... lasso, and upon encircling something with it, the weave is transferred to the target, thus making the lasso fall apart entirely as a major component of its structure abruptly ceases to be part of the object.

This transfer-and-break is the same general method through which most of Marigold's "one-use" charms work - as the effect is now tied to the target's body, rather than an object, it simply remains in effect until the weave "wears in" to the body entirely, shifting it from an effect active on the subject to a part of the subject's body.

This means that, before the effect is fully integrated into the body, it can be broken, though as with all charmcraft some effects may still linger. This also makes it so, technically, the charmcraft only casts an effect on the caster - the same effect through which pretty much all Medals work - rather than being a direct interface a la wiring it directly into the bug's body, which is illegal and what Marigold spends a lot of time tiptoing around to produce major effects on a bug's body without the single most useful method for bodily alteration Charmcraft has to offer.

...that was longer than we really expected it to be. We are working on the other contestants, both of this round and the last, though it's going very slowly seeing as the afternoon sun is currently hot enough to melt our brain into a fine sludge. We've got a solid idea of all three other Round 2 designs, and we've finally got a sketch for Mal - though Pola is being delayed, still, due to our poor comics-making decisions. We're working on it! Slowly!

If we could figure out how in the hell to represent it visually, we'd be working on making a loser's bracket, too, but as is... listen, we're not a graphics designer for a reason. If you are a graphics designer and we can outsource designing a loser's bracket to you then please contact us. We have a budget of approximately ten dollars. We can do PayPal but if your payment processor of choice is US-exclusive we cannot help you.

[mantisgodsart]

…some intriguing samples from out of kingdom that I've recently come into possession of. Though I'm fairly certain that I already have a specimen of this species, she's been uncooperative enough with the idea of taking samples that I doubt I could obtain samples of similar nature from her, and I first met her at quite the late stage of the disease. With the opportunity to observe progression from the very beginning of infection…

...didn't really expect to see the same bug in testing twice, but... here we are! The circumstances surrounding this tournament are quite... out of the ordinary, so to speak. I suppose it was always possible for something like this to happen - I just didn't expect it to happen so soon.

I wish that I used something more tailored last time, honestly, but... well, I can only do so much in the space of a week. At the very least, this round gives me more space to operate - with the chance to test on the exact same subject again, I can cut a lot of individual variation from a test. The base Lizard formula's been refined well enough that I don't need to test it again, but using it as a base for something else, I might be able to further my studies on more selective...

@bug-oc part 2. Everything is fine.